The Welfare Effects of Gender-Inclusive Intellectual Property Creation

Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception. In 1970, women published a third as many books as men. By 2020, women wrote the majority of new books. Adding new products can have significant welfare benefits, particularly when product quality is unpredictable. Using data on sales of over 8 million individual titles at Amazon, 2018-2021, along with information on 200 million ratings of 1.8 million books by 800,000 Goodreads users, the author develops measures of both the supply of new books by male and female authors, as well as their usage by heterogeneous consumers. The paper presented in this ZEW research seminar shows that growth in female-authored books has delivered substantial increases in the female-authored shares of consumption, book awards, and other measures of success, indicating both that the additional female-authored books are useful to consumers and that product quality is unpredictable. The author calibrates a simple structural model of demand and product entry ith unpredictable quality to quantify the welfare benefit from the additional female-authored books. While revenue gains to female authors come partly at the expense of male authors, the gains from inclusive innovation accrue to a wide range of consumers.